DLS continues to receive media attention in the form of last week’s Daily Iowan article: UI Libraries working on digitizing. As evidenced by another DI article written 10 months ago: Welcome the online library (p.8A), the public’s curiosity continues to grow concerning the Google Book Search Project. Recent developments such as the University of California joining the project’s original partner libraries, the “Google 5” have prompted press releases in the mainstream news.

Public misconception that all books will be made publicly available to be read online by Google may be leading to the fear that the GBS will lead to the decrease in the importance of libraries. Rather, only books in the public domain will be made completely available, so mainly the GBS will be really what its name implies, a search tool for finding books. The retrieval of those books will still very often need to occur at libraries.

Additional impact on libraries from the GBS, as Paul Soderdahl, Director of Library Information Systems, points out in the article, will come in the form of digital library departments finding freedom to digitize the “local history, original collections, and unpublished works” that their libraries have collected, and making them a part of the broader digital, scholarly record. One of the locally significant collections mentioned in the article include Samuel Calvin’s (as in the UI’s Calvin Hall) photograph collections, which depict early Iowa City as well as the wider geology of Iowa.

DLS will indeed continue to keep one eye on the developments of this project and consider its impact, while continuing to focus on providing the campus and community with access to significant digital information in support of teaching, research and artistic creation. The article specifically mentioned the Iowa Digital Library, the portal through which this valuable digital content can be accessed. Go see for yourself.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian